Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an airtight test apparatus and method and, more particularly, to a test apparatus and method by using an air-extracting method to test an airtight property of a case assembled with additional members.
Description of the Related Art
Electronic devices will have different requirements of protection depended on various environment. For example, water proof, dust proof and so on. Sealing defects of the device are normally occurred on the gage of shell, the additional members on the shell which has a through hole (for example, speaker, microphone and port and so on) and the additional members themselves. Although the airtight property of the additional members is well, the additional members are fixed on the case by a coverlay. If the stickiness of the coverlay is not strong enough, the additional members will be not attached well with the case and fall off or have a gap between to allow the electronic device having a poor airtight property. Furthermore, if the coverlay is not even enough, there is still a gap occurred after attaching the additional members so that the airtight property of the electronic device is also poor. The conventional manufacturing process mainly performs the water proof or duct proof tests after assembling whole model in order to confirm the overall sealing condition. However, the poor airtight property is occurred after the assembly of the whole parts is finished so that it is difficult to rework and the cost is increased. When the sealing defect is too bad to discard, it will cause the unnecessary assembling cost and devices waste. Furthermore, generally speaking, the case of the device will have a plurality of sealing regions, such as speaker, microphone and ports. It is hard to confirm which sealing regions result in the defects. It also increases the difficulties of rework. If it is necessary to check the airtight property of each of the sealing regions, a tape may be used to attach the region needed to be sealed and only one sealing region will be remained for testing. However, repeating the actions of tape attached and removed will be wasted a lot of time and be necessary operated by people, so the testing cost is hard to decrease.